Month: October 2016

The folks over at Wired invited President Barack Obama to guest edit the November issue of the magazine. The theme is Frontiers. I finally got around to reading the president’s introduction to the issue, “Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive.” I entirely agree with the president. In his essay, the president writes:

Let’s start with the big picture. By almost every measure, this country is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or even eight years ago. Leave aside the sepia tones of the 1950s, a time when women, minorities, and ­people with disabilities were shut out of huge parts of American life. Just since 1983, when I finished college, things like crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and poverty rates are all down. Life expectancy is up. The share of Americans with a college education is up too. Tens of mil­lions of Americans recently gained the security of health insurance. Blacks and Latinos have risen up the ranks to lead our businesses and communities. Women are a larger part of our workforce and are earning more money. Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age.

And just as America has gotten better, so has the world. More countries know democracy. More kids are going to school. A smaller share of humans know chronic hunger or live in extreme poverty. In nearly two dozen countries—including our own—­people now have the freedom to marry whomever they love. And last year the nations of the world joined together to forge the most comprehen­sive agreement to battle climate change in human history.

I reported on all of those positive trends and more in my book, The End of Doom. As a politician, President Obama will naturally hype policies like climate change regulation as part of his legacy. But setting that aside, all of his other claims about improvements in the human prospects are true. But where the president disappoints is when he tries to explain how all of this truly marvelous progress occurred. Consider:

This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-­looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges. Science is how we were able to combat acid rain and the AIDS epidemic. Technology is what allowed us to communicate across oceans and empathize with one another when a wall came down in Berlin or a TV personality came out. Without Norman Borlaug’s wheat, we could not feed the world’s hungry. Without Grace Hopper’s code, we might still be analyzing data with pencil and paper….

Because the truth is, while we’ve made great progress, there’s no shortage of challenges ahead: Climate change. Economic inequality. Cybersecurity. Terrorism and gun violence. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ­antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Just as in the past, to clear these hurdles we’re going to need everyone—policy makers and commu­nity leaders, teachers and workers and grassroots activists, presidents and soon-to-be-former presidents. And to accelerate that change, we need science. We need researchers and academics and engineers; programmers, surgeons, and botanists. And most important, we need not only the folks at MIT or Stanford or the NIH but also the mom in West Virginia tinkering with a 3-D printer, the girl on the South Side of Chicago learning to code, the dreamer in San Antonio seeking investors for his new app, the dad in North Dakota learning new skills so he can help lead the green revolution.

That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody.

All of these sentiments are surely worthy, but the President has entirely missed the main motive forces behind rising global prosperity and health. They are the advance and expansion of the institutions of free markets, property rights, and the rule of law. Without the globe spanning networks of cooperation enabled by markets, almost none of the progress cited by the president would have occurred.

The only time he comes close to alluding to any economic actors at all is when he mentions a dreamer in San Antonio seeking “investors” for his new app. He offers no acknowledgement or understanding of the vital role played by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and inventors using markets to create and supply new products and services. Finally, look at the list of sorts of people whose help the president says is needed to clear hurdles. They nearly all work for government or nonprofits. Surely they will contribute to future progress. But the absolutely essential role of private business and industry is wholly overlooked.

I agree totally with President Obama that today is the greatest time ever to be alive. I just wish he had a deeper understanding of why that is the case and what is needed to insure that human progress will continue.

The Denver Police Department is currently in the midst of a long but carefully considered process as it rewrites its use of force policy. Of particular note is the new emphasis on the “minimum amount of force necessary,” rather than the current norm of placing limits on the most extreme measures police officers feel they need to take during a confrontation.

The Denver PD’s chief, Robert White, told the Denver Post that officers will be trained on how to keep their cool during specific high-risk scenarios they may encounter. Of the department’s evolving policy, White said to the Post, “I’m of the opinion it’s just not good enough for officers to take legal actions, but they also need to make sure those actions are absolutely necessary.”

Chief White says he expects some resistance from the rank-and-file over the new policy, which puts more strict limits on the use of force than required by the state and the federal government. But White insists that the changes to policy, which also now include a “duty to render aid” on someone who has been on the receiving end of police use of force, are necessary for maintaining the department’s integrity and community trust.

Denver’s Sheriff’s Department announced earlier this year that it would also be reforming its use of force policy, which now encourages deputies to deploy “verbal judo” to de-escalate potentially volatile situations. The Sheriff’s Department’s new policy also requires deputies to intervene if they witness a misuse of force, and to not restrict detainees’ breathing with their body weight during an arrest.

Though the Denver PD reportedly consulted with 14 other police departments and considered the recommendations put forth by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, some groups—such as the city’s Citizen Oversight Board—do not appreciate that the new policy is being written internally by the police department. White insists that the current draft is only that, a draft, and that it will be made public to allow concerns from the community to be considered before the final policy becomes official.

McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed is very impressed with the political machine might of renegade CIA Mormon former Republican Evan McMullin, who is polling strong in his home state of Utah. He believes, according to his headline, that “Evan McMullin Isn’t Just Running For President — He’s Literally Building A New Party.”

I don’t think the actual reported details, or recent American history (see the quick fade of the “Reform Party” in the wake of the last time an independent candidate, Ross Perot, did surprisingly well in a presidential run and then tried to spin a Party off that success) support that belief that a McMullin Party will be significant in America’s political future, though only time will tell, as they say.

But one of the details Coppins uses to support the notion McMullin has some real political machine savvy behind him doesn’t quite do so. Coppins writes that “According to his advisers, they’ve assembled serious state organizations across the country on a shoestring budget, enabling them to hustle their way onto 11 state ballots in the space of just 10 weeks.”

Let’s see how “serious” an operation one would need to achieve that.

Caveat: while unless one is a ballot access lawyer or professional, one might not be aware of certain specific tricks and complications with specific states. For sure that achivement is a sign that his campaign was able to hire a pro or two to read, study, and understand the specific requirements of the hows, wheres, and from whos of ballot access. It’s always a little tricky, by design.

But the surface money and/or signature requirements for the 11 states McMullin made are not particular signs of a juggernaut machine moving forward to flatted the GOP (or the Libertarians, perhaps their true target to begin with).

According to this very useful compilation of deadlines and requirements from America’s undisputed ballot access guru Richard Winger, longtime publisher of Ballot Access News, getting on those 11 ballots as an independent non-Party candidate (for the states where McMullin wasn’t merely adopted by an existing Party structure that had already done the work) required a total of 14,500 signatures collected and $1,500 dollars spent. (That is the dollars-as-dollars in the states of Colorado and Louisiana which allow a pure money solution, not the dollars that almost certainly had to be paid to professional signature gatherers, always a big expense for small parties or independents.) That’s 1,400 or so signatures a week, or 200 a day. Five petitioners working eight-hour days would need to net five signatures an hour to achieve that. It isn’t nothing, but I wouldn’t use it as proof of stunning organizational power.

Excluded from that signature tally is New Mexico, which was a special and interesting case; it had the highest signature requirements of any of the states McMullin got on, 15,388, and indeed originally the state’s secretary of state concluded his campaign failed to gather enough, then after a lawsuit permitted him on the ballot in a pre-trial settlement. But you can add that number as well for a fuller, yet still not staggeringly impressive, assessment of his machine’s ballot access power.

The New Mexico victory was won by the “Better for America” organization, which predated McMullin’s own personal organization and is officially now dormant.

As I wrote back in June, getting on the ballot from that point was a little difficult, but not impossible, and McMullin’s machine grabbed only the lowest hanging fruit.

Richard Winger at Ballot Access News details how even McMullin’s small successes were achieved:

in five of those [11] states, the ticket could not have got on the ballot if prior minor party and independent presidential candidates hadn’t won lawsuits against ballot access laws…

Not withstanding all the assistance that prior ballot access activism had done to benefit McMullin, the McMullin campaign has refused to join in any efforts to ease the ballot access laws. Even though he said he would sue states with unconstitutional ballot access laws, he did not do so.

Last week I had the opportunity to debate prostitution-decriminalization at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Obviously, I was arguing for full decriminalization—putting me in the ideological company of sex workers from Seattle to London to Taipei to Kazakhstan, as well as global human-rights and health groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Health Organization. Arguing for the Nordic model of prostitution law, in which paying for or advertising sex is prohibited but selling it is legal in limited circumstances, was Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services at Sanctuary for Families.

You can listen to audio of the debate on Soundcloud, or watch the whole thing below.

If you’ll permit me a moment of naval-gazing… I was happy with my debate performance overall, especially considering I’ve never debated one-on-one before and am much better at arguing in text than in person. Where I think I failed was in getting bogged down in a back-and-forth about statistics. Leidholdt was armed with a bevy of them, mostly from disreputable studies carried out by anti-prostitution activists, and my impulse was to push back on these.

But for those who know little about sex-work issues, there’s not much to latch on to in a she-said/she-said over facts and figures. And without any frame of reference, “facts” showing that countries with legalized prostitution are plagued by terrible spikes in sex-trafficking seem more immediately credible, given that people are prone to believe all manner of horrors about anything related to sex. People seem to want to believe prostitution is inherently harmful, and studies and statistics are rarely powerful enough to overcome people’s implicit biases. But the concrete harms that criminalizing prostitution has on vulnerable people’s lives—the individual tales of hardship and horror that women and girls face under a system of criminalization—are harder to dismiss. Obviously different arguments work better or worse with different crowds, but in the future, I’d probably do better to avoid the stat-trap and stay more big picture when talking to general audiences… yes? no? Genuinely interested to hear what people think.